The Mug

A dollar at the thrift store,
maybe less,
white and unimpressive,
a small chip on the rim
where it had clearly lost an argument
with another mug
in some other kitchen
some other year.

I bought it anyway,
or maybe because of that,
and brought it home
where it has stayed,
holding coffee that was too strong,
tea that was too weak,
water at one in the morning
when I needed something
to put my hand around
that wasn’t a thought.

This morning I was washing it
and I thought of you,
which is the kind of comparison
I would never say out loud
because you would, fairly,
laugh,
and ask which one of us
is the chipped one,
and I would not have
a good answer.

But here, on the page,
where you are not yet looking,
I can say it:
that you have held
the strong mornings
and the weak afternoons,
the small panics
of three a.m.,
the days I came home
unbearable
and the days I came home
not unbearable
but only by a little.

You are not the mug, of course.
The mug is the mug.
You are the hand
I have not yet found
a good enough word for,
which is why I keep
washing this small white thing
in the sink
as if rinsing it carefully enough
might tell me
how to say
the larger thing
I have been failing
to say to you
for years.

The Hats of Old Men

There is the man in the trilby
who has spent forty years
in the same library carrel,
turning brittle pages with the tips of his fingers,
almost finishing a novel,
his hat tipped at the angle
of someone who once intended
to be a great deal more interesting
than he turned out to be.

Down the street, under a straw boater,
a man kneels in his garden
counting tomatoes, counting beans,
the way a banker counts
when no one is looking.
He used to throw the kind of summer parties
people still talk about
when they’re trying to remember
what summer was for.

The cowboy hat is harder to write about
without sounding like a country song,
so I will only say this:
the man wearing it
no longer has the horse,
but if you watch him cross a parking lot
you will see that his hips
still know things
his hands have started to forget.

And what about the bowler,
which I always think looks slightly embarrassed
to be sitting on a head at all.
The accountant who wears it
plays cricket on Sundays
and tallies columns the rest of the week,
which is, when you think about it,
the same thing
performed in different weather.

The beret arrives last, of course,
the way painters always arrive last.
There is a small spot of cadmium red
on the left index finger
of the man underneath it,
and a longer story about Paris
that he is willing to tell
but is hoping you won’t ask for.

I could go on. The baseball cap
on the veteran at the diner counter,
the homburg on the gentleman
who still owns three suits,
the fedora someone’s father
left on a hook
when he went out one morning
in 1962
and somehow never came back
to retrieve it.
Each one a small declaration,
a way of saying
this is who I was,
or wanted to be,
or am still attempting,
balanced on the head
of a man going nowhere
in particular,
which is, I think,
where most of us are headed
most of the time.

The Weight of Words

The pen is cheap. The desk is real. I am not writing to be remembered — I gave that up the year I gave up the other thing. I am writing because the room is quiet and someone has to stay awake. A child laughs two houses over. A door, somewhere, clicks shut behind a person I used to know. I cannot tell which of these is happening now and which I am only allowed to keep. The page does not care. The ink does not care. This is the part they don’t tell you — how much of it goes on without you. And still my hand keeps moving across the small lit square of the table like a man walking out to feed the animals in a snow he can no longer feel. When I stop, I stop. The dark will have what it always had. But the dog, patient at the door, will still be standing there — and that is what I meant by God.